21 killed in Iraq bomb attacks

Two separate bomb attacks in Iraq Thursday killed 21 people and injured scores of others.

At least 12 people were killed and some 30 wounded in a suicide car bomb attack in Iraq's capital Baghdad Thursday afternoon, an interior ministry source said.

A suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden car into a security checkpoint and blew it up on a main road in the predominantly Shia district of Kadhmiyah in the northern part of Baghdad, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The attack against the Shia Muslim community was the second in the day after the blast in a booby-trapped minibus near a Shia mosque in downtown Kirkuk, some 250 km north of Baghdad, which left at least nine people, including three children, dead and 53 others wounded, many of whom were women and children.

The huge blast struck dozens of people seeking refuge in the Shia mosque. They fled their homes in the city of Tal Afar in northern Iraq in the wake of advances by extremist Sunni insurgents, the source said.

The security situation began to drastically deteriorate in Iraq June 10 when bloody clashes broke out between Iraqi security forces and hundreds of militants of the Islamic State (IS) insurgent group who took control of the country's northern city of Mosul.

The IS later seized swathes of territory after the Iraqi security forces abandoned their posts in Nineveh and other predominantly Sunni provinces.